Cooperatively farming small patches of Earth in Columbus, OH

Monthly Archives: October 2014

Are these not the most beautiful gems you’ve set your yes on? Pam gave us a handful in the spring. Said the flowers would attract the hummingbirds. We didn’t see too many this time around, but are eager to try again next year.

Today’s happy hour was all about seeds. We got a bunch of radishes in the ground that should be ready for Thanksgiving and planted out a row To test under winter cover. Thankfully we had an architect on hand to help us install our low tunnel hoops! (Inside joke, really anyone can do it…)
Hoping for a small winter harvest of spinach and arugula from that bed and a nice crop of beets and carrots in early spring.
Todays’s harvest: arugula and mustard greens, rosemary, parsley, Thai basil, chives, and dahlias. Lots of things that go well with sweet potatoes and butternut squash. Bon appetitio!

We had another productive happy hour this past Sunday. Got all the tomatoes and tomatillos cleaned out as well as the peppers. Harvested a nice selection of greens for folks to take with them as well as some rosemary plants for overwintering. Thanks again for the help you guys!

Melissa and I weighed the sweet potatoes. 129.4 lbs. Now they are taking a little nap in the basement wrapped in doubled-brown sleeping bags. Should be ready in plenty of time for Thanksgiving. CSA folks get ready!

Happy hour today was all about garlic. Spreading compost and tilling the soil to get the beds ready, then digging a few hundred deep holes and pushing the cloves underground. I don’t think we’ll have quite as many bulbs as we did this year, but hopefully what we have will be better. Last fall we were so late ordering our seed (because we didn’t take possession of the property the farm is on until mid-November) that we had only one option – one supplier, one variety. This year I ordered early from Green Mountain Garlic in Vermont. They had a wide range of options and I got some with nice big cloves – Music, German X Hardy, and Romanian Red. The Chesnook Red we had this past year had good flavor, but the itty bitty cloves are a pain to deal with in the kitchen. We put some of the largest we had in the ground with the rest and gave them all plenty of space. And now we wait. Til next July.

The Hughes family was back and, as always, looking totally hip. Elizabeth fit right in. It was a productive visit.

(Like garlic which we are actively working on getting in the ground so we can reap the reward eight months from now…)

Early in the season our dear friend and CSA member Melissa suggested the idea of an x-ray machine that would allow us to see below the surface, to see the sweet potato tubers growing. I loved that idea and referenced it over and over in my mind and in conversation. Last week I broke down and pulled the soil from atop one of our 25 plants. The results were totally amazing. tubers that measured over a foot in length and weighed over 5 lbs.

Getting the rest of the crop out of the ground the past few days has been like digging for buried treasure. Now, the long wait ’til they are cured, sweetened by time (and some ambient heat and humidity in the basement next door), and ready to eat. You can be sure these will be part of our Thanksgiving feast.

Early June. Sweet potatoes were in the row to the right with the black plastic.

Pre-harvest. (Since June sweet potatoes moved north and south taking over where carrots (to the left/north) and garlic (to the right/south) were.

But this one is in the lead for best of show this season. Handwritten from an Ohio gal in her 70s. Whenever someone who spent their life in this place tells you your tomatoes are the best they ever had you can be only one thing: Humbled. (And you forgive them for adding an extra vowel to the end of your name.)